I think it's a fun game at its core, it just needs better balancing and tweaking here and there.
Aesthetically it's stellar, and the spooky Halloween color palette + pixel art is what has drawn me to the game in the first place (but you shouldn't have different pixel sizes for various assets, because then something looks “pixelated” and something looks “smooth”; breaking the consistency)
The update system is awesome and would definitely be what makes me keep playing for a while – if I didn't have trouble with actually collecting the coins at a satisfying pace.
The main flaw and the most frustrating part – in my opinion – is the unpredictability of the falling pumpkins. When they appear, you have very little time to react, let alone avoid other pumpkins falling in the direction you're running towards.
Then you're supposed to be primarily collecting coins to progress, but those are scarce and again, you need to be quite near to reach them, avoiding the pumpkins in the process.
All the while you're wondering why the ground has to take up so much of the screen.
Consider the following options:
– move the ground lower (this gives the player more time to react)
– show an arrow at the top of the screen briefly before a pumpkin or a coin is about to fall, so it's not a complete surprise
– it suddenly starts getting insanely quick around the 15 score mark, is it the difficulty curve you want? Or should the increase in speed and pumpkin frequency be more gradual?
Secondly, I gave up before unlocking anything because after several runs I had just about ten coins, but in fact, I would need twenty-five to unlock *anything*. You ideally want to give the first reward pretty soon, almost immediately, to keep the players motivated.
Consider increasing the coin frequency, or lowering the required costs, and perhaps give some small amount of coins for a good score, so you can feel you're progressing after a good run even when you didn't manage to collect an interesting number of coins.
And btw, using 'space' to confirm anything isn't very intuitive – before reading the Author Comments, I thought the game was stuck after either clicking on the button or pressing enter did nothing.
Nevertheless, it's a very solid Halloween game, pretty fun and enjoyable. Well done!
P.S.: Did you hear about the Halloween event?
https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1528553
If so, and you wish to participate, you may need to use the tag “halloween2023”.